Summary

NaCo is short for NAOS-CONICA. It was installed at the Nasmyth B focus of UT4 from 2001 through 2013. In 2014 it was reinstalled on UT1 at the Nasmyth A. It provides adaptive optics assisted imaging, imaging polarimetry, and coronography (only L) in the 1-5 micron range.

The adaptive optics system, NAOS, is equipped with both visible and infrared wavefront sensors. It contains 5 dichroics which split the light from the telescope between CONICA and one of the NAOS wavefront sensors.

CONICA is the infrared camera and spectrometer attached to NAOS and is equipped with an Aladdin 1024x1024 pixel InSb array detector. It contains several wheels carrying masks/slits (including focal plane coronographic masks), filters, polarizing elements, grisms and several cameras allowing diffraction limited sampling across the full wavelength range. Spectroscopic observations are no longer offered. CONICA was not intended to be operated without NAOS, though now observations without adaptive optics are possible.